How many clicks does it take to get to the gates of Hell? I don't know, many! But you can start counting in a few hours.

I'm not quite dedicated enough to the franchise to be in line at midnight tonight, and if you notice anyone at your work place who is mysteriously ill tomorrow you can safely blame the demons of hell and actually have a pretty good chance of being correct for once.

Though PvP has been removed (for now) and the game appears to have been watered down for the shareholders, in the end Diablo 3 still promises to be a very entertaining co-op experience, and being the glutton for punishment that I am, hardcore mode is calling my name.

I'm sure I'll see some of you there. I haven't spent much time looking at all the info that Blizzard has made available, and although I'm not expecting War and Peace, I'm going to do my best to avoid spoilers and see the plot through as I progress through the game as it should be enjoyable. So far all I really know is that I'm leaning towards a Witchdoctor, but who knows!

As I've mentioned several times before, part of the draw of these online worlds that now have millions of inhabitants is that you don't always know what's around the next corner, behind the next asteroid, or uh... well whatever you get the point.

I realize that in this day and age we're simply used to being able to look up everything about everything and then immediately consider ourselves experts on every topic even though we've never actually done any of these things ourselves, and while this may be more of a societal problem than anything else - it's ruining my virtual day!

I used to like new EverQuest expansions, or even whole new games because I would be surprised from time to time, or even excited to find out what would be coming next.

It seems that these days the only things that still have any degree of secrecy about upcoming events are television dramas and the occasional movie.

I don't need to know exactly which items I will be wearing and exactly what they will look like as well as where and what percentage chance I have of finding them.

I'm not blaming sites like mmo-champion or wowhead, or the whole Curse network for that matter, when the information for all of the possible events in the game is already there on your computer, someone is going to extract it at some point so we may as well be efficient and consistent about doing it, I guess.

Sure there's the argument that I could just not read it, and to be honest I do my best to give these things only a cursory glance. I'm not one to run to the forums and discuss the implications of a 5% increase in Seal of Righteousness' attack power scaling, but I'm competitive, I don't particularely want to be behind the curve and surprised by things that will set me back - and so I read at least a bit about them to make sure I'm at least on par with the average player; but I feel dissapointed every time I do. Not so much because of what they're doing, but because it would have been fun to find out while I was actually playing the game.

Remember in EverQuest's beta when spells didn't tell you how much damage they did? It would just say "a gnoll pup's skin ignites" and you would see the bar decrease by some amount.

It didn't matter that you didn't know specifically what percentage damage you were doing, you didn't need to parse it out to determine the theoretical maximum DPS you could extract from your abilities, you just played the game by feel, and learned about it by talking to other players about their experiences.

There's really no way this will ever change, and I guess I'm just being a cranky old purest, but I would love to have to actually figure something out once in awhile. It wouldn't even be quite so irritating if it wasn't compounded by the fact that most games seem to go out of their way during gameplay to ensure you don't have to figure anything out on your own.

The pipes you could warp through in Mario weren't a different colour, you figured out which ones worked just by trying it. You were able to discover things by playing the game, instead of reading about them on Google, or even worse have the game interrupt you while playing to tell you what to do.

In regards to WoW specifically there actually is this sort of challenge at only one point - If you try to do dungeon and raid achievements immediately after leveling to the maximum level - before someone has figured out the optimal strategy for completing them and posted it all over the Internet as well as before you're able to just throw overpowered equipment at the problem.

I will always remember the rush to Heroic Dungeon Master achievements with some of my old guildmates as one of the few truly entertaining parts of Warcraft.

Despite my better judgement, I've decided to join a small, slowly growing movement in World of Warcraft; the Ironman Challenge.

The basic premise of the traditional WoW Ironman is that you level from 1 to 85 without ever learning any talents, tradeskills or equipping any items that are better than white (common) in quality.

The most important part of the Ironman criteria being that your character cannot ever be killed.

Needless to say this makes things significantly more difficult.

I'm always complaining that WoW is too easy, so I decided to see for myself how different it would be if it was actually as hard and unforgiving as I would sometimes like it to be.

While the traditional WoW Ironman is already incredibly painful, I just wouldn't feel like myself unless I added some of my own stipulations:

My criteria is as follows:

Character can never be killed.

Character cannot complete any quests.

Character cannot receive any items or money from any source.

Now, at first glance this doesn't seem to be too different than the normal Ironman challenge, but when you realize that without money I can't use mounts, take flight paths - I can't even repair my equipement. In fact as I write this I have no idea what I'm going to do when my starter axe finally breaks.

I can however make use of class specialization and talents, one of the few things in Azeroth that are completely free. The obvious caveat being that most talents rely on class skills that I don't have, so I have to spec creatively.

The life of a WoW ascetic is probably not for everyone, but I am committed.

Who knows, maybe sleeping under the stars, starving myself and running for dear life every couple of days will lead me to some sort of MMO apiphany, or maybe I'm just going to waste a lot of time.

ArenaNet has decided to open up Guild Wars 2 beta signups for the next 48 hours only.

While the reasonable, mature part of myself knows that getting excited about an MMO before release leads down only one of two roads - dissapointment or addiction - and is currently sitting on the sidelines, considering if it's worth taking either... the MMO nerd part of me is already bounding happily down the road screaming CHARR WARRIOR while filling out the signup form.